The tyrannosaur lumbered toward them, bellowing.
“Turn around!” King screamed. “Turn around!”
But Dodgson didn’t turn around. He slammed the car into reverse, and started backing down the trail. He was driving fast, and the road was narrow.
“You’re crazy!” King said. “You’re going to kill us!”
Dodgson swung his arm, smacked King with his hand. “Shut the flick up!” he shouted. It took all his attention to maneuver the car back down the winding trail. Even going as fast as he could, he was sure the tyrannosaur would be faster. It wasn’t going to work. They were in a fucking jeep with a fucking cloth top, and they were going to get killed and –
“No!” King shouted.
Behind them, Dodgson saw the second tyrannosaur, charging up the road toward them. He looked forward, saw the first tyrannosaur bearing down on them. They were trapped.
He twisted the wheel in panic and the car ran off the road, crashing backward into dense underbrush and surrounding trees, and he felt a jolting impact. Then the rear of the car dropped sickeningly, and he realized the back wheels were hanging over the edge of a hill. He gunned the engine frantically, but the wheels just spun in the air. It was hopeless. And slowly, the car sank backward, deeper into foliage so dense he could not see through it. But they were over the edge. Beside him, King was sobbing. He heard the tyrannosaurs roaring, very near now.
Dodgson flung open the car door, and jumped out into space. He lunged through the foliage, fell, hit a tree trunk, and tumbled down a steep jungle hill. Somewhere along the way he felt a sharp pain in his forehead, and saw stars for the brief moment before blackness enveloped him, and he lost consciousness.
Decision
They sat in the Explorer, on top of the ridge overlooking the jungle-covered east valley. The windows were down. They listened to the bellowing of the tyrannosaurs, as the huge animals crashed through the underbrush.
“They both left the nest,” Thorne said.
“Yeah. Those guys must have taken something.” Malcolm sighed.
They were silent a while, listening.
They heard a soft buzzing, and then Eddie pulled up alongside them, in the motorcycle. “I thought you might need help. Are you going to go down?”
Malcolm shook his head. “No, absolutely not. It’s too dangerous – we don’t know where they are.”
Sarah Harding said, “Why did Dodgson just stand there like that? That’s not the way to act around predators. You get caught around lions, you make a lot of noise, wave your hands, throw things at them. Try to scare them off. You don’t just stand there.”
“He probably read the wrong research paper,” Malcolm said, shaking his head. “There’s been a theory going around that tyrannosaurs can only see movement. A guy named Roxton made casts of rex braincases, and concluded that tyrannosaurs had the brain of a frog.”
The radio clicked. Levine said, “Roxton is an idiot. He doesn’t know enough anatomy to have sex with his wife. His paper was a joke.”
“What paper?” Thorne said.
The radio clicked again. “Roxton,” Levine said, “believed that tyrannosaurs had a visual system like an amphibian: like a frog. A frog sees motion but doesn’t see stillness. But it is quite impossible that a predator such as a tyrannosaur would have a visual system that worked that way. Quite impossible. Because the most common defense of prey animals is to freeze. A deer or something like that, it senses danger, and it freezes. A predator has to be able to see them anyway. And of course a tyrannosaur could.”
Over the radio, Levine snorted with disgust. “It’s just like the other idiotic theory put forth by Grant a few years back that a tyrannosaur could be confused by a driving rainstorm, because it was not adapted to wet climates. That’s equally absurd. The Cretaceous wasn’t particularly dry. And in any case, tyrannosaurs are North American animals they’ve only been found in the U.S. or Canada. Tyrannosaurs lived on the shores of the great inland sea, east of the Rocky Mountains. There are lots of thunderstorms on mountain slopes. I’m quite sure tyrannosaurs saw plenty of rain, and they evolved to deal with it.”